Van Dyck was in Palermo, Sicily, when a plague broke out and the city was quarantined. On July 15, 1624, the remains of Saint Rosalie—the city’s patroness, who died about 1160—were opportunely discovered on Mount Pellegrino, which is visible here above the harbor of Palermo. Images of Saint Rosalie were in great demand; this one was painted by Van Dyck on top of a striking self-portrait that he had sketched on the canvas. The artist employed a design he had used earlier for paintings of the Assumption of the Virgin.

Athens. National Gallery Alexandros Soutzos Museum. "From El Greco to Cézanne: Masterpieces of European Painting from the National Gallery of Art, Washington, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York," December 13, 1992–April 11, 1993, no. 9.

Wilhelm R. Valentiner. A Loan Exhibition of Fifty Paintings by Van Dyck. Exh. cat., Detroit Institute of Arts. Detroit, 1929, in "Additional List", as "attributed to School of Van Dyck, but original of the Italian Period".

The canvas was cut down on all sides, which probably trimmed the paint surface slightly at the left and right. Large losses extending from the putto at top left to the saint's left hand have been compensated with matching canvas and repainting. The landscape is very worn and the upper sky is restored. Autoradiography has revealed beneath the paint surface a self-portrait sketched in grisaille, by Van Dyck, who turned the canvas upside down for the present picture.

From mid-May to the autumn of 1624, Palermo suffered a severe plague, and on June 15 the city was quarantined. Saint Rosalie's remains were found on Monte Pellegrino on July 15, and an inscription, seemingly carved on the walls of the cave by Rosalie herself, was found forty days later. Her name was entered in the Roman Martyrology in 1630 by Urban VIII. Van Dyck must have worked rapidly on pictures of Saint Rosalie during the weeks after her remains were discovered. When he fled Palermo in September he took this painting with him; it was completed in Genoa in 1627, and received in Palermo in 1628. The larger version of the present picture (Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Munich) appears to be an autograph replica. A painting in the Prado described by Díaz Padrón [see Ref. 1975] as a copy of the Museum's picture is more probably a copy of the version in Munich. A drawing with a similar composition, in St. Petersburg, has been related to the Munich picture, but the attribution to Van Dyck is not convincing. The self-portrait sketched in grisaille revealed beneath the paint surface through infrared reflectography was probably painted in Italy in late 1622 or 1623, presumably in Palermo.